Maybe I’m wrong, but this didn’t feel like him taking pride in the name, it feels very ironic. Like “I’m a complex person with complex feelings, but at the end of the day I’ve got to be ‘Commander Badass’ the stereotypical manly-man who hides his feelings because that’s what my job is, that’s what people expect of me.”

Mike, “Owning and redefining the name”. Yep. That’s the reason he actually said it with prideful face.
Quoting XX-century philosopher Jose Luis Aranguren, “when you decide to use someone else’s idea or reasoning (be it because you liked it, or because it convinced you), you’re no longer ‘using someone else’s idea’: you’re actually making it your own”.
Commander Badass made his name, well, HIS.

jared accidently triggering all those mega stones inside gayrados and making the ultimate glowing pokefish that ever was! is what i would do for 400 but i’m weird like that :P early congrats on the milestone

Somehow I’m reminded of the time he stole his own coffee. It’d be kinda neat if his future self showed up with beers or sandwiches or something as a sort of inversion/callback, but I’m sure you’ll come up with something. You always do, come hell and/or high water.

Thankyou for an amazingly funny 399 strips. I hope you’re seeing even a hair of the happiness you’ve brought to others in your life. Even that small a sliver probably would be an ocean at this point. :)

Throughout all of this I really like how it’s HIM that ended up being the one trying to “make it work” while his partner was the one who you have to work around and still suffer for it anyway. Really nice, I like.

Just do a one-panel comic of Commander Badass being badass at his job. Just a “we’re back to everyday life” kinda thing. Helps reset after this arc so anything zany that goes on next doesn’t feel discordant. And it isn’t too big a project hopefully. Could also be turned into a super-cool wallpaper without too much effort if you do it right, which would also be nice.

Looking forward to number 400! An if you’re looking for suggestions, might I humbly recommend Jones, Jared, The Commander, and his kids watching a Narwhal jumping out of a swimming pool? I recommend this for no real reason than it randomly popped into my head and I thought it’d look cool. But no matter what you do, I’m looking forward to it!

I hope you don’t take this the wrong way but if you’re looking for suggestions, maybe you could go back to form and actually focus on video game jokes again? It’s been a really long time since we had anything substantial and even if it’s about old Kratos, I don’t think anyone would mind. I always wondered what jokes never made it to the comic.

Honestly, people bitch and moan every time I make Overwatch jokes but as of now Overwatch is about the only game I play that’s actually updating content and keeping fresh. We live in a world where it’s been nearly five years since the last God of War game came out and Ganondorf hasn’t been in a main series Zelda game since 2006, the well is running dry.

I think it would be really nice if for the 400th comic we all went back to the thread of the very first comic and posted about how grateful we are to the author for all her hard work and congratulate her for how far she’s come and what the comic means to us.

There are highlights now! Highlights! TPIM has always been base colours and shades! Now there are highlights! You can’t just introduce highlights out of nowhere like it’s nothing you maverick, not unless you wanted utter chaos!

Well I’ll be darned. You’d think as an artist making their living drawing I would have seen that before now, pardon my lapse in observation please. :)

I *was* just joking to point something out that I thought looked really good, I am just a silly person. So, well done and again, early congratulations for reaching 400 updates on a long running series that I greatly enjoy and check on regularly n_n

Dawns on me, looking at his expression with those lines in the final panel…

It’s not a, ‘Hey, I’m still commander badass, and I earned that title, and something like that isn’t going to take it away from me.’

It’s more, ‘Hey, even with all the relationship drama in the world, being a big teddy bear, running a therapy clinic, and helping dudes get touch with they’re emotions, in spite of all that, people still consider me ‘Commander Badass’ because that’s what I was built to be without my input, when all I really wanted is to be that ‘Free Hugs’ dude.”

I’ve been reading this comic for years, and this right here. This is the strip that gets me. I never had that closure with my abuser. I never had that beautiful conversation to wrap things up nicely. And that he gets to have it, and can move on from it, and still be “commander badass”; it’s everything I wanted and I’m genuinely so happy for him that he gets it. I might be crying a little. Thank you for writing this.